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• News In Brief
• Calendar
• Lawmakers pledge bipartisan cooperation
• This time, talking wins
• council 2 achieves recruitment firsts
• New legislators' list
• Welfare reform could threaten your job
• Lowering retirement age gets tougher
• Corrections officers spread holiday cheer
• New bill brings hope to some

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Council 2’s 43rd biannual convention will be held at the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane June 6, 7 and 8. The speakers will include afscme President Gerald McEntee; afl-cio’s new Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson; and Senator Patty Murray. The convention also includes a number of training centers and seminars that will aid your efforts to represent your members. The convention call will be mailed to local union officers during the month of February. Delegates to the convention are based on the average number of dues paying members for the months of January, February and March of the convention year. They are elected by their locals.

In future the $1,000 scholarships awarded each year by Council 2 will bear the names of special people as a memorial to them. They will be named for deceased people who have been of great service to the union or for dependents of active members of Council 2. The decision to name the scholarships in the memory of such people was taken by the executive board of Council 2 in October after a suggestion by board member Dea Drake. This year, the first year in which the new initiative takes effect, one of the scholarships will be named after Brian Givens Ñ the son of Local 2617 shop steward Rosalie Givens Ñ who died in an airplane accident, and the other after Joe Parisi, an area director of afscme, who died in 1995.

Although the Democrats gained ground in the House of Representatives, adding six seats, they did not win sufficient seats to control the House, which now consists of 42 Democrats and 56 Republicans. The make-up in the Senate, which the Democrats lost for the first time, is 23 Democrats and 25 Republicans. The previous line-up was 25-24, with the Democrats in the majority. "The good news is that in the House the anti-labor extremists were defeated," Thompson says. "That will provide more room for the moderates to compromise. And so the news is not all bad."

Major issues for labor in the session:

• Welfare reform. The key aspect of this issue is to make sure that Council 2 members are not displaced by welfare recipients in terms of new legislation.
• Contracting out. With a change in the leadership of the committee handling this issue, Council 2 is going to have to set its sights a little lower, Thompson explains. "Any real improvement is less likely." Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, a Democrat representing the 10th district, was the chair of the Government Operations Committee in the Senate, Thompson explains. "She is no longer chair," he says. "We had been working with her committee on drafting a bill that included the improvements for both the counties and the cities." The new chair is Bob McCaslin, a Republican who represents the 4th district. In addition, Thompson adds, Council 2 had been meeting with county and city representatives as well as the contractor community. But the contractors stalled, made no commitments, and waited out the results of the election.
• Retirement issues. Efforts to come up with an earlier retirement age for pers ii members have become more difficult.

Chalk up a victory for peaceful negotiations. After three years of hard work, a new contract has been signed between Local 21-R and the City of Renton. That might not seem such an unusual achievement in itself. But the successful negotiations came in the wake of a bitter strike that erupted three years ago when talks on the previous contract broke down. The strike, which began Nov. 9 1993 and lasted for two weeks, shut down many aspects of city operations, including the municipal court, building inspections and permits, Maplewood Golf Course and all financial and clerical work in City Hall. The Renton City Council finally approved more money to meet the workers’ demands. But the strike also left wounds in its wake. From then, Local 21-R, assisted by Council 2 Staff Representative Kathi Oglesby, worked to ensure that, if possible, another strike would not result when the contract came up for renewal in 1996. Now, after three years of hard work, they can look back with satisfaction and pride on a new contract that is not only favorable to the 270 workers involved, but was achieved through peaceful negotiation. Local 21-R spent the last three years trying to heal from the strike. Members worked hard, both in the union and with management, to try to prevent a repeat of the climate that led to the strike and the strike itself. At the same time, the local also was committed to making gains in their contract. They accomplished all of those things. Two additional factors helped in achieving a new contract peacefully this time around. One was the absence of an outside contractor. The city’s human resources director, Beverly Nelson Glode, bargained the contract for the city. Oglesby was the chief negotiator for the union. Another factor was setting a settlement target date. The goal set by both the local and the city, was to have a contract before the Dec. 31, 1996 expiration of the then current agreement. After laying the foundation over almost three years, the union and the city management held 11 full-day bargaining sessions over a 35-day period. "The negotiations were conducted in a very positive, collaborative spirit," Oglesby says. The resulting three-year agreement was overwhelmingly ratified by the membership and approved by the Renton City Council. It was signed on Dec. 18 and went into effect on Jan. 1. "With the help of hard, dedicated work from our local negotiators, we got a very good settlement," Oglesby says. The agreement provides for 100 percent of the cost of living - based on the Seattle consumer price index - each year for three years. Also gained were increases in longevity and a new step in longevity pay; an increase in shift differential; significant changes to clarify language and fix some areas of the contract that had caused grievances in the past; and a new 1 percent deferred compensation contract for all bargaining unit members. The contract covers all the workers for the City of Renton except for those in the Police and Fire Departments and in management. The workers include various classifications, such as janitors, engineers, court and library staff.

The Local 21-R bargaining team consisted of: Charles Andrews, local president; Malcolm Thomson, vice president; Margaret Pullar, secretary; Becky Scheffer, treasurer; Mike Benoit; and Ron Hemphill. The Renton mayor, Jesse Tanner, acknowledged that peaceful negotiations were a much better way to go than a strike. For the first time in recent memory, Local 21-R received an equitable settlement along with Police and Fire Department workers. That had been a campaign promise of the mayor when he ran and subsequently won in November 1995. He fulfilled that promise. With the help of Council 2 and Local 21-R, of course.

Here is what has happened:

• A citywide unit representing workers for the City of Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho voted in the Fall to join Council 2. The link with Council 2 goes back some years to the time when Bill Keenan, Staff Representative in Spokane, was an employee of the city of Coeur d’Alene. He was one of the initial creators of the association that became the first afscme local in Idaho. So, of course, Keenan always has hoped that the city workers would join Council 2. After he recently held discussions over a lengthy period of time with them, the 80 city workers voted to join the union. Paula Eberle is president of the new local 433.
• The 300 workers of Laidlaw who serve the Spokane School District have voted to become members of Council 2. The workers are bus drivers and para-transit van drivers as well as attendants who assist handicapped bus travelers. Although Laidlaw has links with Council 2 through the school district, it is a private organization that provides bus services for schools all across the country. Yet now its Spokane School District workers are fully fledged members of the union. Why did they want to join Council 2? "They were the only remaining non-union group of school district bus drivers in Spokane County," explains Keenan. "Because of that, their wages, their benefits and the way they are treated are far less than all the other school districts." The group was totally unorganized before they joined Council 2, Keenan added. They had no contract of any sort. "We are starting from scratch," Keenan said. The Laidlaw workers do not have a local number yet, but they will receive one.
• In other organizing wins, 25 new members from the Area Agency of Aging, which covers Lewis, Mason, and Thurston counties, have filed a petition for representation. And an additional 25 members from the King County Industrial Waste Program have filed a petition for representation.

New Legislators' list

NOTE: Telephone numbers with 786- prefix are in the 360 area code.

Letters and postcards: Address letters and postcards to your legislators (Sen. Jane Doe or Rep. John Doe), State Legislature, Olympia, WA 98504. When writing, be brief, specific and polite. Ask for a response.

Telephone calls: In addition to the specific numbers on this page, you can contact your legislators by calling the Legislature’s toll-free hotline at 1-800-562-6000.

They will not have:

• Workers’ compensation;
• Minimum wage or overtime requirements;
• Coverage under the Family and Medical Leave Act;
• Protection of anti-discrimination laws;
• Coverage under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha) requirements;
• The right to be organized and represented by a union;
• Unemployment compensation.

"While we have no issue with reform that requires work for benefits, we want to ensure that our members’ standard of living is not lowered by the influx of thousands of low-paid employees who have no protections," he says. "The public sector no doubt will receive the lion’s share of these employees." The state officials have no choice but to put these 14,000 people to work; if they don’t, the federal government will cut the state’s money for welfare programs. "Someone working for a living should not be replaced with a welfare recipient," Thompson says. "They are likely to be playing musical chairs with these jobs. "By these welfare recipients flooding the work place, you can see your wages cut and your job displaced."

Among those at risk are:

• Road crew workers;
• Parks Department workers;
• Sanitation Department workers;
• Food service workers;
• Custodians;
• Health Department employees;
• Clerical workers.

Thompson says that, for example, several part-time welfare recipients could replace a full-time worker in the Parks Maintenance Department of a city. The state has developed a game plan to try to cope with the repercussions of the measure. Former Governor Mike Lowry submitted a plan to the legislature that provides protection for displacement in all sectors. The plan extends the protection of a number of federal and state laws to the welfare recipients who will occupy the positions. The coverage of these laws includes health and safety, industrial insurance and the minimum wage. But coverage does not include collective bargaining rights. "His draft plan goes a long way to help," Thompson says. "But the problem is that his plan is going to be ignored." Lowry ceased to be governor on Jan. 15. An additional problem is that none of the welfare recipients will be defined as an employee, so the recipients are unlikely to be protected by membership of a union. "We will work with the leadership of the House, the Senate and the Governor’s office to ensure that the displacement of current employees is prohibited and that these employees are extended the same rights of any other employees," Thompson says. "We will do our best to protect our members. Legislators need to understand that if employers are allowed to exploit this cheap labor pool that other workers’ rights will be diminished. Without any rules, members are at risk. "The trouble is that the federal law has not provided any protection for existing workers."